This invention relates generally to backup and restore operations, and more particularly to optimization of storage resources in integrated data protection systems.
Data protection systems that protect data long term from loss due to corruption or damage with backup and recovery/restore approaches, particularly those used for enterprises and large data systems, need to conserve storage capacity and optimize resources. To accommodate the unrelenting increase in data and to meet the availability and data protection requirements of enterprises and other organizations, datacenters must provide sufficient primary and backup storage capacity to handle these needs. Typically, this means providing the same amount of backup storage capacity as the primary storage capacity, which results in reserving excess storage capacity. However, excess storage capacity is costly to provide and to maintain, adds significant overhead and inefficiencies, impacts application servers, processes and networks, and slows backup, restore and other system processes.
While there are data protection systems that integrate primary and backup storage and that de-duplicate and compress backup data, which reduce the need for storage capacity and address many of these inefficiencies, there is still a need to minimize excess storage capacity and to optimize storage resources. Most known systems require configuring restore devices of the same capacity and count as backed-up application devices in order to avoid having a situation where there are no available resources to which to restore lost or corrupted data. Although restore devices may be thinly provisioned, they nevertheless consume a large amount of metadata which requires scarce memory storage capacity and has a direct impact on a user.
It is desirable to provide resource optimized storage and data protection systems and methods that address the foregoing and other known problems of storage and data protection systems, and it is to these ends that the present invention is directed.